


take my name and just let me be

by verity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bodyswap, Consensual Brainwashing, Gen, Gender Issues, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Genderqueer Character, Identity Issues, Identity Swap, Nonbinary Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 18:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1951614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky becomes Natasha. Natasha becomes the Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take my name and just let me be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophia_sol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophia_sol/gifts).



> thanks so much to filiabelialis, sophia-sol, and Ashe for all their help! <3

**1.**

When he woke up, it happened in slow waves. Steve's face, dragging Steve out of the river. A partial surrender. This isn't like that at all. He looks in the mirror as he reaches his arms behind his head, twisting his red hair up into a neat bun. What he remembers is from the outside, of course, video footage and static photographs, but this body knows, too. He can trust this body.

"Hey, Natasha," the Falcon says, ducking his head into the bedroom. "You ready? Think Cap wants to get this show on the road."

The press conference. Right.

—

"We tried to contain damage to a small radius," Steve says, face solemn for the cameras. "The factory—"

Bucky keeps his face neutral and tunes Steve out. He was at the factory last week, he knows well enough the sequence of events that followed their entry into the building. The press conference is for what the public saw: an industrial building in Lowell bursting into flames. That was routine enough for most people behind the scenes—Avengers engaged, HYDRA outpost destroyed, mission over.

The reporters clustered below the dais don't know about HYDRA, and Steve doesn't know about what happened to Bucky or the Black Widow down in the bowels of that old building, or how they returned yesterday to finish the job. Steve was right there, of course—Iron Man shot a repulsor blast right past Steve's shoulder and through the device sitting between Bucky and the Black Widow. The device sputtered, beeped, and died. Farther back, something blew up.

As Steve and Tony sped toward the explosion, Natasha held out a hand to Bucky and helped him up from the floor. Their eyes met for a long moment before Natasha cleared her throat and said, "Watch your balance."

"These shoes have a heel," Bucky said. His voice came out high and throaty; he didn't sound anything like her.

The Black Widow tapped his chin up with a metal finger. "Keep your mouth shut."

—

"Nice heels," Pepper says at lunch two weeks after the factory. "Are those the new Louboutin collection?"

"Yes," Bucky says, demurely crossing his legs at the ankle. "Surprisingly comfortable."

The pumps he's wearing are stilettos with a gold fishnet upper and cost $795.00 before tax. Bucky can't recall ever owning anything this fine or this expensive, but he can't recall a lot of things. Natasha gave him her browser history, magazine subscriptions, and bank statements, though, so he doesn't have to. The bracelet on his wrist is a hammered gold crossover cuff from Tiffany's; the cap-sleeve sheath he's wearing is Zac Posen, soft, clinging jersey.

Pepper smiles. "Tony keeps buying me shoes. I'm waiting for him to spill what he did."

—

Bucky's memory is unreliable, porous. What he knows best comes from museum exhibits, government files, and newspaper articles. Steve says stuff like, "Remember that time we went to Coney Island with Becky and Kitty Brown? You and Becky went on the Tornado three times in a row and then you threw up cotton candy all over my shoes on the boardwalk. Remember?" Bucky doesn't remember. It's just a story to him; it could have happened in a book, a movie, could have happened to anyone.

No one looks at Natasha like she's a puzzle they think can be solved. Hill says, "I found the plans you wanted, they should be on your tablet," and Bucky wakes it from sleep to find the blueprints to an abandoned automobile plant. Thor says, "Come, Widow, I require a worthy partner in this drinking game of pong," and Bucky drinks the Hulk under the table. Steve—

Steve says, "You want to go for a run?"

If he'd asked a week ago, Bucky would have frozen, turned away, but Bucky's not just Bucky anymore.

—

"You can't just make me _you_ ," Bucky said. "That's not how it works."

The Black Widow shrugged. "People see what they expect to see. All you have to do is show them that." She seemed at ease in his body, slouching into the delicate couch in the front room of her apartment. Of course, when Bucky sat on that thing for an hour, his ass had gone numb; appearances deceive.

Bucky was not comfortable in the Black Widow's body. It was too small, fine-boned, with some equipment he was missing and some he'd never had before. Her breasts got in the way. The knuckles of her left hand were scarred and breakable. He looked at his hands in his lap and thought about what she had said to him the other night in the ruins of the factory. "What's in it for you?"

"I'm not me anymore, either," the Black Widow said. "I'm only Natasha."

—

Natasha's identity has been compromised along with SHIELD, so she's no longer doing deep ops, just working with the Avengers and enjoying her newfound leisure time. Bucky goes to gallery openings, trade shows, and the gym; he quietly recertifies on all of Natasha's old weapons and a few new ones. He gets a nightingale-dropping facial. "You don't exactly… relax," he says to her as they stroll around the lake in Central Park. "What did you really do, before?"

"What I'm doing now," the Winter Soldier says, smiling at him with his old face.

"Oh," says Bucky.

—

Steve used to glance at him longingly, like Bucky was absent even when he was present; the person Steve yearned for was still a discarded body tumbling to rest in a snowy crèche. Steve never looks at Natasha like that. He doesn't push her or test her, but neither does he pull his punches. Natasha's already proved herself.

Soaking with dirty sewer water, alien bits splattered around them, Steve is all grins. He claps Bucky— _Natasha_ —on the back, says, "Thanks, Nat."

"So, about that girl in the library—" Natasha says, rote, and Steve beams.

Bucky might not remember the journey, the ascent, the fall, but for Steve, he'd march off a thousand cliffs. He'd march right down into hell. Their shoulders brush as they wade their way through knee-deep sludge toward a ladder. Steve gives Natasha a boost up, and she climbs, rung after rung, making her way to the surface.

—

Natasha wears pants and tights for a week after Bucky shaves his legs for the first time. The feeling of smooth skin beneath them is surprisingly nice, sliding against supple wool and knit. He didn't anticipate growing to like this body, its soft curves over solid muscle, its deceptively delicate architecture. When he paints his face, it doesn't feel like a disguise or a costume. In Natasha's body, he becomes her, the way Bucky never could become Bucky.

Not everything is easy. He never gets enthusiastic about sushi, one of Natasha's favorite foods. Natasha is really into heated yoga that makes Bucky sweaty and queasy. Men catcall him on the street. One time he wakes up in Natasha's bed and Nick Fury is standing over him with a pistol jammed against Natasha's heart.

"You're not her," Fury says. "Where is she?"

The last time Bucky saw the Winter Soldier was three months ago. "You'd know better than I would."

Fury glares at him with one murderous eyeball. "Should I be looking for a body?"

"32557," Bucky says, giving it up, that last little bit. "That's hers now."

Fury doesn't take his finger off the trigger. "I don't trust you, soldier."

"Honestly," Natasha says, "Neither did I."

 

**2.**

The Winter Soldier looks in the mirror, evaluates their reflection. They are taller, their shoulders broader, their movements more powerful. The hydraulics of their metal arm move silently as they lift their arms over their head, shirt riding up their long, lean belly with the stretch.

"Natasha," Natasha says, coming up behind them, bright hair a flicker in the shadows behind them that resolves into sleek red locks as she comes closer. Her stride is swift, her posture poised. Even her eyeliner is perfect.

"That's you now," the Winter Soldier says.

—

The night after it happens, Natasha can't stop looking at their wide, unfamiliar palms, one flesh and one gleaming steel. They test their heat sensitivity in the bathroom sink, running water over both hands, hot and then cold. Holding a knife in their palm feels natural, years— decades—of shared muscle memory. Natasha practices a few quick draws, then sets the blade aside to run through a series of asanas on the mildewing carpet in the office building where Bucky's been squatting. This body isn't used to the stretches, and the metal arm responds oddly to the push of their weight and pull of gravity on it, but that isn't surprising. What matters is knowing the limits and stress-points of this body; it's different, but it's reliable—it will serve. This isn't the first time Natasha has exchanged their face for another.

Natasha and Bucky go back to the HYDRA facility the next day, just to make sure the machine is as broken as Tony claims. There's a Hulk-sized fist straight through the middle of the control board; the device itself is nothing more than a cube of dented, scorched metal. Natasha touches it carefully, considering.

Bucky stumbles over the debris on the floor, unsteady on too-small feet, his center of balance lowered. Even on level ground, he was struggling. "What if we can't switch back?"

—

SHIELD's files on Natasha are comprehensive, but not complete. It takes another week before Natasha has enough intel to return to the half-destroyed HYDRA facility with Bucky in tow.

It's unsettling to see their body slip so easily, so comfortably into the chair, to relax so easily into its arms. For a moment, Natasha is envious. They fiddle with the data stick in their palm. "Are you sure you want this?"

Bucky is silent for a minute, so long Natasha is not sure he'll respond. "They can't make me Bucky," he says. "Bucky was a person. He was just a person. I'm not _him_ , I'm never going to be him."

"I'm a person, too," Natasha says quietly.

"You don't want to be," Bucky says with a sly smile that sits strangely on Natasha's face. This may be the last time he'll ever make it, but Natasha can mimic it easily enough. "You want to be a ghost."

—

Natasha sat in chairs like these, too, once upon a time. The Natasha that SHIELD employed was born in 1984, but they give Bucky all of them, their childhood and ballet lessons and glimpses of the Red Room, fragmented memories of him training them. They were never sure he was real, wondered if he was a dream or a plant or just imagination right up until he shot straight through them to kill a man. Then Natasha knew.

Natasha types in the commands at the terminal, uploads the files from the data stick. He'll know their stride, their expressions, the newer fighting techniques they've picked up over the years, everything he could possibly need. He won't become Natasha, but he will _be_ Natasha—a serviceable simulacrum, anyway. The Winter Soldier is exorbitantly competent and obsessively dedicated to completing his missions, and this will be the last one hardwired into the wild reaches of his hind brain.

With their metal hand, Natasha pushes the enter key, and in spooling green type over the black screen, the console begins to execute their commands.

—

On paper, James Buchanan Barnes exists—two of him, born seventy years apart, with separate sets of ID and different social security numbers. The Winter Soldier has a stash of false identities twenty deep, but no real paperwork. They don't have to shift from girl to woman, innocent to coquette, secretary to seductress. Their passports and drivers licenses all say _male_. When they walk around Manhattan with their left hand gloved, their hair neatly barbered, glasses with no prescription perched on their nose, few people give them a second glance. They will learn new roles to play. For the first time in years, the future stretches out improbably before them.

Natasha meets them for coffee in a cafe in the West Village a few weeks later. She is dressed primly, pencil skirt and crisp button-down, like she's a secretary again. Everything in Natasha's wardrobe is some kind of uniform. "I keep expecting it be stranger." She smooths her delicate hand over her skirt.

"The arm is cumbersome in the shower," the Winter Soldier says. "I'll live."

Natasha nods. "Steve worries about you."

The Winter Soldier shrugs. "You know how to find me in an emergency."

"I do," Natasha says. "I know you."

—

"I went to the Smithsonian," Bucky says, kneeling down in the rubble of the HYDRA facility to examine the base of the latest tool to shape them. It's early morning on the next day, pigeons calling on the roof as dawn creeps through shattered windows, spilling in jagged stripes across the debris. "They have an exhibit on Captain America, on the Howling Commandos. I read the whole thing about Bucky. They make him sound like a martyr."

"He was," Natasha says. From this body's vantage point, Bucky looks so small in their own. So fragile. "He died a hero."

When Bucky turns his head toward them, his face is so vulnerable and naked that something aches beneath Natasha's sternum. "I'm not a hero."

Natasha holds out a hand to help him up. Carefully, they say, "You could be."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
